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Topic: Most passive to most aggressive species of bee (Read 6181 times)

i personnally am looking for a more aggressive strain as i hope for a correlation to their aggressiveness toward pests, energy at gathering nectar and resources (go getters). Of course i have no science to show just that.

I know one professional beekeeper who has Elgons. It is Buckfast type artificial race. Elgon word is mountain of Kenia and African A. monticola blood has used in breeding. Olsson use small cell size in brood boxes.http://www.elgon.se/story3/sven-olof_ohlsson02.htm

I kept a few years Elgon bees but the crossings with Italians become quite furious gang. I must give up that creature. When I treated varroa, hives has as much mites as Italians.

Olsson lives on area where is no other beekeepers. It is easy to keep strain pure.

One thing I've noticed here, are bees with mostly black on the tips of the abdomen with successively thicker yellow bands going toward the thorax. These bees are a few millimeters shorter than the straight banded bees.

i certainly can't evaluate things from a distance, but this kind of observation (strange bees with black tips) are often not a separate race or variety...these are generally robbers that have had the yellow hairs rubbed off of the abdomen, exposing the black exoskeleton. a few milimeters is a lot of difference in size for a bee. workers are 12mm or so long, "a few" (more than "a couple", less than "several"...perhaps 3mm?) is about 25% smaller. these robbers could be your bees returning from their pillage, or they could be robbing your hive.

Deknow, I'm familiar with the hair pulling. These bees are far too numerous to be veteran robbers. They all have the same pattern, and I didn't see them from a distance, as I was saying I would sit next to the entrance and watch the bees for hours. They are black tipped, about 1/3 the length of the abdomen, with the second third having a thin band of yellow, a thicker band, and the thickest with a hair thin line of black in the last third.

I would say about 2 mm shorter than the regular Italians and thinner bodies. I thought they might be robbers as well, and there were plenty of fights, but there were so many of them I figured they were different genetics coming out. The trees around here have plenty of rotten branches and trunks, so I can only suppose they came from there or the neighbor's hives across the road.

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